Reading notes
• New York Times, July 29, 2010: Amazon is introducing a new version of its Kindle e-reader that will sell for $139. This low-end version will be a wireless-only unit, so you’ll need to have access to a wi-fi system to download books and so forth. But wi-fi is pretty easy to come by these days, so plenty of people will be attracted to this version, which is lighter than earlier versions and has greater book storage capacity. Apple has sold millions of iPads but you gotta believe its price ($499) is beyond the reach of a large segment of the population. Not so with this new Kindle, which will be out just in time for the holiday season.
• New York Times, July 29, 2010: The new e-books coming out have a lot more to offer than a digital replication of a printed book. “The new multimedia books use video that is integrated with text, and they are best read — and watched — on an iPad, the tablet device that has created vast possibilities for book publishers,” the Times reports. The new e-book version of Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein, includes 27 videos scattered throughout the book. “Most are news clips from events described in the book, including the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960,” according to the Times. The possibilities are, indeed, vast, and this is where the iPad has a distinct advantage over the Kindle.
• Orange County Register, republished in the Las Vegas Sun, July 27, 2010: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., recently took possession of a cache of multimedia material from the Nixon presidential years: “300,000 photographs, 2 million feet of film, 4,000 videos, 30,000 gifts, 4,500 audio recordings and 46 million pages of documents.” This is stuff Nixon wanted destroyed, but Congress intervened to protect it. Litigation ensued. “Finally, in 2004, a deal was reached that allowed the collection to leave the Washington area,” the Register reports. And a few months ago, “21 trucks loaded with documents left College Park, Md., and pulled up at the library in Yorba Linda.” Since then, researchers of all kinds have been poring over the materials, most of which have not yet been properly indexed. Rest assured, interesting revelations will come, eventually, from this trove, including, perhaps some new information about Howard Hughes, one of my pet interests.
• New York Times, July 26, 2010: Wealthy and upper-middle-class people in Indonesia tend to speak English more than the national language. They also send their children to private schools where they can learn almost exclusively in English. This has created cultural and political problems in Indonesia, where some fear the demise of their national language. Also, if kids raised on English have trouble speaking Indonesian, it could create conflicts and difficulties for them.
• New York Times, July 26, 2010: The National Journal, described as “a sleepy weekly magazine for lobbyists and lawmakers,” is aiming to increase its profile and its vitality. It has hired Ron Fournier, former Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, as its editor in chief. Also, Ronald Brownstein, a former Los Angeles Times political columnist, will work alongside Fournier to increase the magazine’s profile. More hires are expected soon from the cream of the nation’s political reporting crop.
• New York Times Book Review, July 15, 2010: Elizabeth Gilbert’s best seller, Eat Pray Love, now a movie starring Julia Roberts, is not the first book “to mass-market the ashram experience.” An essay by David Shaftel reminds that in 1944, Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge sold more than 3 million copies. Pico Iyer has called it the prototypical hippie novel. Shaftel traveled to the ashram where Maugham visited in the late 1930s and found “no landmark to commemorate his visit nor is The Razor’s Edge sold in the well-stocked bookstore.”
Truman Capote: an excerpt
From Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. Here, in a piece published in 1959, Capote writes about when he was a young boy and encountered Louis Armstrong. Just an amazing scrap of writing:
“Surely the Satch has forgotten, still, he was one of this writer’s first friends, I met him when I was four, that would be around 1928, and he, a hard-plump and belligerently happy brown Buddha, was playing aboard a pleasure steamer that paddled between New Orleans and St. Louis. Never mind why, but I had occasion to take the trip very often, and for me the sweet anger of Armstrong’s trumpet, the foggy exuberance of his come-to-me-baby mouthings, are a piece of Proust’s madeleine cake; they make Mississippi moons rise again, summon the muddy lights of river towns, the sound, like an alligator’s yawn, of river horns — I hear the rush of the mulatto river pushing by, hear, always, stomp! stomp! the beat of the grinning Buddha’s foot as he shouts his way into ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ and the honeymooning dancers, dazed with bootleg brew and swearing through their talcum, bunny-hug around the ship’s saloony ballroom.”
Richard Stern: an excerpt
The Chicago writer Richard Stern has a new collection of nonfiction pieces out called “Still on Call.” This excerpt deals with the fundamental difference between fictional characters and real people:
“A fictional existence needs but a tiny proportion of what constitutes real life. . . . [Fictional characters] offer clarity seldom experienced in the murk and complexity of real life. . . . Fictional people have been honed and sharpened, rehoned and resharpened into a kind of perfection which not even the greatest saints, sages and heroes of real life touch. There is no revision in real life. Even if one makes up for what one has badly done, the make-up action exists alongside the “original.” And even in the best of real life action, there is so much accompanying complexity, both ex- and interior, so much that reveals next to nothing, that it never approaches the comparative purity of fictional action where every thought, dream, opinion, exchange and interaction matters. The individuality of a living being may resemble that of an author’s creation, but the creation is purer, clearer, as reflections in water, free of the bedazzlement and impurities of the atmosphere, are clearer and usually more beautiful than what they reflect.”
The books on my desk right now
I have a lot of books in my house. They are shelved in every room. There also are books shelved and in boxes in the garage. But the subset of books on my desk strikes me as moderately interesting. Here’s a look:
BOOKS I AM READING:
– Reno’s Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City by Alicia Barber. I’m about halfway through this book. I’m taking notes along the way, because I owe the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly a review.
– Reporting at Wit’s End: Tales from the New Yorker by St. Clair McKelway. This is a collection of articles by the late New Yorker writer. I’m about a third of the way through this book, and I’m enjoying it immensely. McKelway is the forgotten man of the New Yorker, but his work is every bit as interesting to read today as that of more famous contemporaries Joseph Mitchell or A.J. Liebling.
– Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. I’m about a quarter of the way into this book, and it’s fantastic. The essays are included chronologically, so I’m still reading Capote’s earliest nonfiction, the highlight, so far, being the 1955 nonfiction novella “The Muses Are Heard.” Capote is an amazing prose stylist.
– About the Author: Inside the Creative Process by Nicholas Basbanes. This is a new collection of Basbanes’ interviews and profiles of modern writers. Most of these were newspaper articles. Basbanes is a fine chronicler of the history of the book and book collecting but he’s also very good on writers and writing.
BOOKS I HAVE READ:
– Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. This intriguing and maddening book will be the subject of a dialogue between Scott Dickensheets and me soon on the Las Vegas Review of Books website.
– Corn Flakes with John Lennon: And Other Tales from a Rock ’n’ Roll Life by Robert Hilburn. This is a fine memoir of Hilburn’s tenure as chief music writer for the Los Angeles Times. Lots of great stuff in here about Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, U2, Nirvana and others. I intend to write a review of this book for the Las Vegas Review-Journal‘s Book Nook blog.
– Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. Thought-provoking political essay by one of the most respected public intellectuals in the world. I have started writing a review of this book for the Las Vegas Review of Books website.
BOOKS I PLAN TO READ SOON:
– What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey. Hard to find but highly praised meditation by a British critic on the issue succinctly described in the title.
– Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim. This essayist from the 1960s and ’70s is highly touted.
– The End of Major Combat Operations by Nick McDonell. A McSweeney’s book by a young writer who was embedded in Iraq.
– About Writing: Essays, Letters & Interviews by Samuel R. Delaney. This book by an eccentric science-fiction writer is said to be more interesting than most such how-to books. Eager to find out.
– The Walk by William deBuys. The writer is a professor of documentary studies at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, and the book is described as a “mix of memoir, landscape and social history” in a specific area of New Mexico. Found the book in a Southern California independent bookstore and for some reason it drew my interest. I think deBuys’ is regarded as something of a modern-day Thoreau. Eager to find out but this one will have to wait a bit.
– Bad Nature, Or with Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marias. Marias is a Spanish writer of great acclaim. This book is 57 pages long in a small format. It’s really a long short story. But it’s about Elvis, which is the focus of my next book, so I had to have it.
– The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I’ve been looking forward to this one coming out in trade paperback, which is did last week. I thoroughly enjoyed Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, and I hear this one is even better.
BOOKS I AM READING ON MY KINDLE:
– Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture by David Hajdu. Great writer. Currently reading a piece on Sammy Davis Jr.
– Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll by Mikal Gilmore. Very good music journalism.
Jacques Cousteau’s ‘Homo aquaticus’
So, I was reading this little Dell paperback I picked up recently at a used bookstore. It’s called “Edge of Awareness: 25 Contemporary Essays,” edited by Ned E. Hoopes and Richard Peck. First published in 1966. Some good stuff in it, including essays by Jack Kerouac, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Arthur C. Clarke. A nice piece on the craft of writing by Paul Engle. Some thoughtful pieces on a range of subjects pertinent to the human experience.
Late in the book, in a section dedicated to science, I came to an essay by James Dugan tited “Portrait of Homo Aquaticus.” Dugan was a friend of Jacques Cousteau, the famed French sea explorer. The piece is about Cousteau’s vision of a future in which men live underwater. Now, Cousteau wasn’t thinking about men living within machines providing oxygen to breathe and so forth. No, Cousteau’s vision was that a surgical procedure will be devised so that men will have gills like fish and be able to survive under water for long periods.
Cousteau, of course, was involved in the invention of the Aqua-Lung, which allowed men to breathe underwater without having to be tied to an air tube reaching the surface. Neat thing. But this futuristic vision of the man-fish was something else entirely. Cousteau believed this “underwater species will come in about fifty years.”
“He should be able to swim to a depth of about a mile, instead of the mere fifty fathoms [300 feet] of present-day free diving,” Cousteau said. “Home aquaticus won’t be able to go beyond a mile because, when we reach that stratum, the external pressure will be about 170 atmospheres. At that point tissue would begin to compress and the body would be literally wrecked.”
The great adventurer didn’t just envision a few brave, surgically enhanced men experimenting with underwater living. No, he saw entire “colonies of underwater workers” engaged in various forms of exploration of the uncharted depths.
What fascinated me about this article was how soberly this science-fiction notion was presented, not only by the author, who obviously had a bias toward Cousteau, but by the editors of the collection. By all rights, Dugan’s essay did not belong in this book that included some big-name writers as well as some serious-minded thinkers.
And yet, I was intrigued by the subject. After all, as the article points out, humans come to life immersed in liquid in the womb. It’s where we start, so it’s natural to think we might want to figure out a way to get back to an environment like that. Cousteau’s idea also caught the public imagination during the ’60s. The excitement included an exhibit at the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York depicting what living underwater might look like.
Well, it’s been almost 50 years since Cousteau’s prediction and nobody’s breathing through gills underwater just yet. No real-life Creatures from the Black Lagoon. But I decided to look around the Internet a bit and see if people are still talking about this idea. Not surprisingly, they are.
Conspiracy theorists offer revelations of secret Navy experiments with artificial gills that of course have been covered up. But all in all, the dream of Homo aquaticus seems to have lost its momentum. Most people seem content to go scuba diving on tropical vacations. However, there does appear to be a nascent movement to create hotels under the sea. I can imagine a fair number of people wanting to spend some quality time underwater without needing artificial gills implanted in their bodies.
The cool new side project
Scott Dickensheets and I have started a new side project called the Las Vegas Review of Books. It’s a website dedicated to long-form writing about books. No, not necessarily books about Las Vegas. Any and all books that we think might be interesting to write about.
The first post is up. It’s a “back and forth” essay in which Scott and I discuss the merits and demerits of John D’Agata’s new book, About a Mountain. I think we delve into some fairly interesting territory, such as whether nonfiction needs to stick absolutely to the facts or whether some literary license should be allowed.
Check out the site here, or it’ll always be listed in the blogroll on the right side of this page.
Photos from the ‘Showdown in Searchlight’
These are some photos taken at the “Showdown in Searchlight,” the Tea Party event on March 27, 2010.
Geoff, Steve Sebelius, Scott Dickensheets, Ken Miller.
My report from the Tea Party thing in Searchlight
The Huffington Post website has posted my report from the scene of the Tea Party event today near Searchlight, Nev. Go here to check it out.
Also, Los Angeles journalist Marc Cooper gave my piece a nice plug and offered further analysis here.
I probably will have a few more observations about my Saturday odyssey soon.
Historic day: House passes health reform
I just wanted to post a short blog item to commemorate passage by the House of Representatives of the health care reform bill. The vote was 219-212.
This is a historic moment. I strongly supported passage of this legislation. I believe it will be a significant advance. I think it’s a great achievement for President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
I was disgusted by the antics of the conservative protesters outside the Capitol over the past two days. There were racial slurs, homophobic slurs, spitting on people and other acts of disrespect to elected officials. An anti-abortion Democrat who decided to support the bill was called a “baby killer” by a Republican lawmaker. Rep. Devin Nunes of California, amazingly, defended the actions of these nutjobs. Then there was House Minority Leader John Boehner equating the bill’s passage to “Armageddon.” “This health care bill will ruin our country,” Boehner said. These are all cases of a step too far.
Now the hard work begins of implementing the reforms. It will be complicated and tumultuous, but it will be worth the effort.
Geoff Schumacher 